
AN 



ADDEESS, 



DELIVEEED AT THE 



LAYING OF THE COENER STONE 



NEW TOWN HALL, 



IN NEWBURYPORT, JULY 4th, 1850. 



BY HON. CALEB GUSHING. 



NEWBURYPORT : 

HUSE & BRAGDON, PEINTERS, DAILY UNION PRESS, 
1850. 



/ 



GIFT 

MAR8ARET W. GUSHING 
JAN. 26, 1933 



V 



AN 



ADDRESS, 



DELIVERED AT THE 



LAYING OF THE CORNER STONE 



NEW TOWN HALL, 



IN NEWBURYPORT, JULY 4th, 1850. 



BY HON. CALEB GUSHING. 



NEWBURYPORT : 
HUSE & BKAGDON, PRINTERS, DAILY UNION PRESS, 
1850. 






Newburyport, July 5th, 1850. 
GEN. CALEB OUSHING. 

Sir: 

At a meeting of the Selectmen of the town of Newburyport, and the 
Building Committee, the undersigned were chosen a sub-committee, to pre- 
sent to you the thanks of both of those bodies, for your able and patriotic 
Address, at the laying of the corner stone of the new Town Hall, on the 
4th instant, and to rec[uest a copy of the same for the press. 

HENRY JOHNSON, ) 

E. S. WILLIAMS, ^Committee. 

THOMAS DAVIS, ) 



Newburyport, July 5th, 1850. 

Gentlemen : 

I have the honor to acknowledge the reception of your note of this 
date, communicating to me the vote of the Selectmen of the Town of New- 
buryport, and the Building Committee, in relation to the Address deliver- 
ed by me on the 4th instantis. 

With expressions of the most grateful appreciation of the good opinion 
of the two Bodies which you represent, I herewith place in j'our hands a 
copy of the Address. 

I am, 

Very respectfully, 

C. GUSHING. 
Misin HENRT JOHNSON, R S^- WILLIAMS, THOMAS DA VIS 



MR. CUSIIING'S ADDRESS 



TO THE CITIZENS. 



Fellow Citizens : 

We have disposed of one of the objects for which 
we assembled here. There remains another, not 
local in its nature, but as wide as the limits of our com- 
mon country. For wheresoever, on this continent of 
the New World, the starred banner of our nationality 
is unfurled, — wheresoever, from the Atlantic to the Pa- 
cific, in all that broad expanse of lake and river, of 
mountain and of plain, — wheresoever springs up one 
blade of corn from the earth, or quivers a waterfall un- 
der the mill, or ascends on high the smoke of the engine, 
or happy hearts shelter themselves under the roof-tree 
of home, — wheresoever, I say, there lives and breathes 
an American, shah this day be consecrated to the mem- 
ories of the Declaration of Independence. It shall be 
celebrated with tumultous joy by old and by young. 
It shall be celebrated with proud recollections of our 
great and wise forefathers. It shall be celebrated with 



mutual congratulations in view of our country's gran- 
deur, wealth and power. It shall be celebrated with 
thanks to Almighty God, that he vouchsafed to make 
of the Thirteen Colonies one people. And it shall be 
celebrated, by us, at least, with fervent prayers to Al- 
mighty God, that he would continue to make of the 
Thirty States one people, — one great, glorious, indisso- 
luble Union. 

Yes, fellow-citizens, the Union is my theme. Now, 
when the currents of false doctrine are sapping the 
foundations of the Union, and the waves of perverted 
passion are dashing against the pillars of the Constitu- 
tion, now is not atime for indulging in the sounding gen- 
eralities of a vague and wordy patriotism. Now, on 
the contrary, it behooves us to consider what the Amer- 
ican Union has done for us ; what it is ; whether it be 
worth the having ; and if so, how it is to be preserved, 
in despite of faction and fanaticism, whether at the 
North or the South. And that, I repeat, is my theme 
this day. 

1. What has the Union done for us ? To answer 
this question, it needs to go back to the time when, 
seventy-four years ago, this day broke on our fathers, 
luridly amid the storms of war ; to follow onward the 
course of our country to the present hour ; and then to 
pause and look around on its present condition. 

When the Declaration of Independence went forth to 
the world, a proper constitutional government, that is, 
a social fabric deliberately commenced from the corner 
stone of universal natural right, and built up in all the 
symmetry, beauty and strength of a perfect whole, was 
a thing yet unknown on earth, and to be attempted by 
us for the first time in the history of man. 

A population of only two millions of souls, scattered 



aloni^the narrow belt of land between the -Alleghanies 
and the Atlantic ocean, constituted the people of the 
United Colonies. Beyond the mountains was a vast 
wilderness, the lair of the wild beast and of the human 
savage. Our public resources were nothing, — save 
the strong arms and stronger hearts, which we inheritv 
ed from our British sires, and the spirit of independence, 
personal and national, which had been diffused among 
us in the shadow of the secular forests of the NewWorld. 

Two generations only, that is, two of the average 
periods of human activity, have since elapsed. • They 
were our grandsires who founded the United States. — 
But now, where and what are we ? Our population 
has filled up its original seats. It has swarmed across 
the AUeghanies, and occupied v/ith its industry, its pow- 
er, its principles, its civilization, the vast and fertile val- 
ley of the Mississippi. The remote Kocky Mountains 
have proved no barrier to its progress. It now stands 
upon the shores of the Pacific, with expansive energies 
unabated, regretful, not, like Alexander on the limits of 
India, that no kingdoms remained to be conquered, but 
that no wildernesses are left to be reclaimed by the hand 
of industry from the dominion of uncultivated Nature. 

Nor in the wrestle with Nature only have we shown 
our manhood, for science, learning, art, have also 
risen up and flourished under the vivifying influences 
of prosperity and freedom ; and in all that appertains to 
material as well as moral greatness, whether in the cul- 
tivation of the earth or in the advancement of mechan- 
ic art, manufacture and commerce, we, the once feeble 
child of England, now range side by side with our great 
parent, while the nations, distanced by us in the race 
of wealth and power, gaze on our marvellous progress, 
with admiration and with awe. 



Nay, we have gone twice through the test trial 
of a foreign war : one with Great Britain, in which 
if we gained no greater honor, we at least gained this, 
of contending on equal terms, and with equal success, 
against the Queen of Nations ; and again, with Mex- 
ico, in which, from Palo Alto to Chapultepec, ^vhether 
under the lead of Scott or of Taylor, wherever the flag of 
the Union waved, it still waved in the front of the fight, 
the labarum of victory. And through the whole period of 
this., our unparalleled growth in greatness, we, and we 
alone, of the nations of Christendom, have exhibited the 
spectacle of a people to whom civil war is unknown, 
among whom no example exists of death for political 
cause, and who have lived in unbroken domestic tran- 
quUity under the aegis of the Constitution. 

2. Is, then, the Union, the source of all these price- 
less blessings, worth having ? Yes, in the madness of 
men to whom superabundant felicity seems a burden, 
we have now come to calculate the value of the Union. 
That I think surpasses our faculty of calculation- When 
we shall have passed those glorious gates of our politi- 
cal Paradise, which separate the known from the un- 
known, then, like the fallen Adam and Eve, gazing, 
miserable and repentant, where, to bar their return, 

" The brandished sword of God before them blazed 
Fierce as a comet,'' — 

then, I say, it will be for us *'to choose" hke them, our 
new "place of rest." Where shall that place be ! You, 
who seek to accomplish objects, for the attainment of 
which you clamorously and ostentatiously avow your 
readiness to trample on the Bible to-day and the Con- 
stitution to-morow, because they both stand in your 
path, — you who set up your moral conscience against 
the former,and your pohtical conscience against the latter 



of you I ask, what are the institutions, and what the po- 
litical condition, wliich you propose to give the people 
of the United States, in exchange for our Constitution 
and the Union, of which that is the charter ? 

That, in the overthrow of the Constitution and the 
disruption of the Union, our national wealth is to be 
destroyed, — that the production of those great agricul- 
tural staples, on which our prosperity depends, is to 
cease, or at least to cease for us, — that our manufac- 
tures are to languish and expire, — that our ships are to 
rot unemployed, — for all this, you, in the zeal of your 
assumed philanthropy, do not care. But can you ex- 
pect, can you be so blindly visionary as to beheve, that 
the bonds of this Union are to be rent asunder by vio- 
lent hands, for the express purpose of a revolutionary 
social change in the relation of the white and the black 
races of the country; can you pretend to think, I say, 
that the political equality of those races is of a sudden 
to be brought about except by force ? You know it ; 
and the first step, therefore, in the constitutional change 
for philanthropy's sake, is the organization of hostile 
Uepublics, plunged at once into war, civil war, social 
war, servile war, all that in warfare, foreign or domestic, 
there is combined of deadly, of atrocious, of horrible. 

I have endeavored to picture to myself that Repub- 
lic of New England, to the adoption of which the in- 
considerateness of many among us, the perverseness 
of others, and the criminally ambitious vanity of a few, 
are, by their assaults on the Union, endeavoring to bring 
the people of Massachusetts. We dissolve the Union 
under the impulse of a blind, bigoted and one-sided 
zeal in the pursuit of ou.r own opinion. We dissolve 
it for the express purpose, as already stated, of imposing 
on the people of others of the now United States, a vi- 



olent and revolutionary change in their social relations. 
We dissolve it in the spirit of fanatical aggression and 
fanatical hatred against them, and they of course 
are to hate us with proportional intensity. I pass over that 
war of crusading philanthropism on the one side, and of 
passionate self-defence on the other, which I have al- 
ready foreshadowed as the necessary consequence of 
disunion, under such circumstances. "We, of the six 
striped flag of New England, shall have at length paus- 
ed a moment in our career of meddlesome madness, to 
examine the internal condition of Massachusetts. — 
When that dread day of reckoning, between union and 
disunion arrives, at some chance interval of truce be- 
twixt us and our enemies, let us reflect how and where 
Massachusetts will stand. We possess, we can possess, 
none of the great agricultural staples, which fill the 
channels of commerce. We depend on importation 
from abroad for the very bread we eat. Those great 
producing and consuming States, against which we 
have been marching our armies and sending our fleets, 
in the cause of abolitionism, have either been broken 
down in the contest, and neither produce nor consume, 
or they have come out of the struggle, victorious and 
vindictive. In either case, our fisheries no longer find 
a market at the South, which will have an abundant 
supply from the British Provinces. Our ships are ex- 
cluded from the ports of the South by difierential du- 
ties, and our ship-owners have transferred themselves 
and their capitals to the South, or to some neutral State. 
Our manufacturers have no longer the markets of the 
severed States secured to them by protective duties, 
and they encounter a ruinous competition, either local 
or foreign, in every port of the South and West. And 
then, with productive industry paralysed, with passions 



inflamed by political disasters, comes that crisis of do- 
mestic conflict, which in like circumstances has come 
on other Republics, which effaced all the glories of learn- 
ing- and art in Greece, which prostrated the colossus 
of Roman greatness, which ruined the once flourish- 
ing cities of mediaeval Italy,- — that conflict between the 
Have-alls and the Lack-alls, in the progress of which, 
when the demons of Party and of Anarchy shall have 
done their work, then, over desolate fields, and ravaged 
dwellings, and depopulated cities, there gleams omnipo- 
tent the bloody sword of the Conqueror and the Tyrant, 
to wreak upon you the vengeance of a justly indignant 
God. That will be what we are to have instead of the 
Union. All experience teaches it. No casuistical soph- 
istry, of tampering with public duty under pretence of 
a conscience above the Bible and the Constitution, can 
avert it That miserable wreck of our greatness will 
be your New England Republic. Therefore, to the 
question, whether the Union is worth having, I reply, 
that it is not only to be cherished for all of good wliich 
it gives, but also for all of unutterable ill, which its dis- 
solution, for such cause, and under such circumstances, 
inevitably involves. 

What then is the Union? 

I reply that it is, in the first place, the letter of the 
written Constitution, defining the rights to be held, and 
stipulating the duties to be performed, by the Federal 
Government, by the States, and by the people of the 
United States, and to which every man owes lawful al- 
legiance, and against which public law no man has 
any more or other right to set up his individual con- 
science, than he has against the municipal laws, enact- 
ed by any one of the States, for the protection of prop- 
erty or life within its borders. 



10 

And I reply, in the second place, that the Union is 
above all the spirit of the Constitution, that is, the senti- 
ment of nationality", the love of country engendered by 
birth, by the ties of domestic life, by community of his- 
torical associations, and by the sense of benefits confer- 
red, and interests protected and promoted, by the in- 
strumentality of the Union. 

The letter of the Constitution is the material body, 
changeable, perishable, corruptible ; the spirit of it is 
t!ie immaterial soul, which breathes into the inanimate 
elements the breath of life, and makes of it a subhme 
and beautiful creation of immortality and of heaven. 

This, the spirit of the Constitution, the sentiment of 
nationality, the feeling and emotion of Americanism, is 
the true Union, the only Union worth having, the only 
Union possible to keep. 

When the American wanders into other regions of 
the earth, then it is that he feels and appreciates the 
true vital spirit of the Constitution, A^^iether, borne 
along by wind and Avave, he walks the deck of his gal- 
lant ship, as her keel cleaves the pathless wastes of the 
ilUmitable ocean, — or he lingers amid the palaces of re- 
ligion, and art, and power, in refined and populous Eu- 
rope, — or explores those Oriental solitudes, whose hal- 
lowed associations are eloquent as it were with voices 
from on high, — or inspects the antique civilization of 
the thronging millions of Asia, — or partakes of the daily 
march and the nightly bivouac on the lofty plateau of 
the New World,— then it is that he feels that he has a 
country, a countiy to love, to be proud of, to defend, 
and to uphold against all enemies. And that country is 
the Union. I have tried it and I know it. Neither the 
pine of Massachusetts, nor the palmetto of Carolina, 
symbolizes to him all there is of dear in the memories 



11 

of home, and of glorious in the name of country. No : 
the inspiration of hope, which no reverses can extin- 
tinguish, the impulse of courage which no dangers can 
daunt, — these are identiiied in our breasts only with 
the stars and stripes of the Union. 

How then is the Union, so dear to every patriotic heart, 
and of such inestimable value to all of us, to be pre- 
served ? 

I reply to this question, by stating how I think it may 
be destroyed; or at least how you, the people of Massa- 
chusetts, if you labor diligently and zealously in that 
view, may do much to promote and finally consum- 
mate the dissolution of the Union. 

Desiring and intending to dissolve the Union, you 
will, in the first place, as you have already done, know- 
ingly, and of malice aforethought, infringe as a State 
upon express provisions of the Constitution, for the 
avowed purpose of injury to the citizens of other States. 

You will, in the second place, as you have already 
done, maintain such unconstitutional legislation on the 
ground of your conscience not permitting you to exe- 
cute the injunctions of the Constitution, thus demon- 
strating to the other States of the Union that no com- 
pact of association with you is of any avail, since you 
in eftect claim the privilege of disregarding the law of 
the land at pleasure, and of being dispensed, not by 
any papal authority, but by your own capricious con- 
science, or pretence of conscience, from keeping youi- 
imphed engagements, or even your solemn express 
oath of fealty to the Union. 

By these acts and doctrines, steadily persevered in, 
you, the State of Massachusetts, may hope to succeed 
in dissolving the Union, so far as that consists of a writ- 
ten constitutional compact. 



12 

Of the individual citizens of Massachusetts, each and 
all may do much to the same end, by exerting them- 
selves to kill the spirit of the Constitution. 

In this aim, you will let pass unimproved no occasion 
for violent, habitual, systematic misrepresentation and 
denunciation of the character and principles of your 
fellow-citizens of other States. In order to do this 
more thoroughly, you will establish newspapers, form 
societies', and hold anniversary and other meetings, for 
the sole or chief object of exaggerating their faults and 
maligning their motives and actions. If accustomed to 
writing or pubhc speaking, you will publish books or 
pamphlets, or perambulate the country delivering lec- 
tures, in the same sense. And if you hold any station 
conferring on you authority as one of the rehgious, 
moral, or political guides of society, you will not fail to 
make your office the special means, as much as possi- 
ble, of disseminating such obloquy and detraction. — 
Thus you will eventually succeed in completely alien- 
ating from you the regard of the citizens of other States, 
and preparing them to accept the disunion you tender 
to them, and to change readily from the conditieui of 
your countrymen to that of your foreign enemies. 

But the people of the several States must co-operate 
in the performance of political acts, without which no 
common government can exist among them, and the 
Union expires of itself You are to elect a Congress to 
enact, and a President to execute, the laws of the Un- 
ion. If you sincerely desire disunion, as would appear 
from the acts and language of many, you will, accord- 
ingly, make the election of President a merely section- 
al question ; and you will be careful to vote for no per- 
son as member of Congress, unless he will previously 
pledge himself to hold such opinions, and propose or 



support such measures, as shall render it impossible fur 
him to co-operate with the members of Congress from 
other States in the enactment of laws for the public 
good. If one of your representatives in Congress ded- 
icates himself to the task of embittering sectional preju- 
dices, inflaming resentments, and resisting all measures 
of concihation, peace, and constitutional harmony, him 
you will glorify and maintain, for he is doing your work 
in furthering the dissolution of the Union. But if one 
of your representatives presumes to speak to you of 
your duty as good citizens, to appeal to your constitu- 
tional engagements, to plead for justice, moderation, 
wisdom, common sense, — him crucify, for he stands in 
the way of your endeavors to dissolve the Union. 

If by all these means and appliances you do not ac- 
complish your object, you need take but one step more, 
and the result is sure. You violate the Constitution. 
You tell the other parties to it that you do not consider 
yourself bound by any engagement you may have made 
with them, however deliberately in time, hoAvever sol- 
emnly in form. By persevering calumny of your fellow- 
citizens, you have at length got them to hate you suffi- 
ciently. You will suffer no public functionary of yours 
to co-operate with them in the common councils of the 
nation. What remains to be done ? But one thing, 
namely, to assure the other States, that it is not for their 
interest any longer to bear with you. And this you now 
do, in proclaiming that your ultimate purpose, your 
sole object, the main business of your life, to which you 
stand prepared to sacrifice both the Constitution and 
the Bible, is to bring upon certain of the United States 
a violent and revolutionary change in their social con- 
dition, which is to constitute of itself their utter inipov- 
ishment, and w hich involves, undeniably, and beyond 



14 

all possible doubt, a sanguinary and destructive war of 
races, fatal to one of them, disastrous to both, and at 
the mere anticipation of which it would seem that ev- 
ery rightly constituted mind would recoil with horror 
and dismay. Yes, I say to you, my fellow countrymen 
of the North, it only needs to satisfy the South that you 
are in earnest in the aggressive purposes in this respect, 
which you avow, and for the accomplishment of which 
you have already taken so many preparatory steps, — sat- 
isfy the South of this, and you will then surely succeed 
in dissolving the Union, for you will have rendered it 
impossible for the South to remain in it without death 
and dishonor. 

Fellow citizens, I have thus briefly sketched the 
means by which the Union may be dissolved, nay, by 
which it is now already placed in imminent peril. — 
Greatly do they err, who imao^ine that this or that shad- 
ow of nullification, whether in Hartford Conventions or 
Nashville Conventions, really constitutes the dark cloud 
of danger, which is gathering and deepeningand lower- 
ing over the firmament of the Union. No : the true and 
only serious disunionism consists of acts of systematic 
aggression of one part of the Union against another, in 
violation of both the letter and spirit of the Constitution ; 
and the true and honest unionism is that, v/hich strictly 
observes the constitutional compact, and is animated by 
sentiments of kindly support, forbearance, good- will and 
conciliation towards our fellow members of the Union. 
Nor is it by the relentless application, to any given 
case, of the mere dead weight of a majority, that the 
Union is to be preserved. We of the North are strong 
in numbers, in votes, in physical force : — is it unionism 
to violate the letter and spirit of the Constitution, and 
thus to place the South in the alternative of the dishon- 



15 

or to be incurred by passive submission to the unjust 
act of a majority, or to imputed factiousness by resis- 
tance to it? No, that is disunionism, as this day, if 
rightly read, may serve to admonish us. For what is 
the Declaration of Independence ? We speak of it as 
the commencement of our nationality. How? Was 
it not also a solemn act of disunion, the declaration of 
an oppressed minority, the Colonies, that they would no 
longer continue united with an oppressive majority, 
consisting of the rest of the British Empire ? Think 
you that no dear bonds of common country, of religious 
and political association, were sundered by the Declara- 
tion of Independence ? Aye, many; for England still 
bore, even on the lips of our forefathers, the affectionate 
appellation of home. But ten years of actual or intend- 
ed unconstitutional aggression on their rights, ten years 
of depreciation and denunciation of their character and 
conduct, ten years of legislative warfare on their inter- 
ests, served to obliterate from the minds of the minority 
all impressions of common nationality with the major- 
ity, and produced that Declaration of Independence. 
And although England set a price on the heads of John 
Hancock and Thomas Gushing as traitors, yet they 
well might and they did retort, that the aggressor and 
not the aggrieved, — that the violator of the public com- 
pact, not the victim of the violation, — that the oppres- 
vsive majority, not the oppressed minority, — was respon- 
sible for the dissolution of the union between the British 
Colonies and the British Metropolis. 

My friends, I repeat, there is solemn admonition, as 
well as proud recollection, for us all, in this anniversary. 
Are we, of the State of Massachusetts, against this Union 
or for it ? If the latter, as I firmly beheve, then it be- 
comes us to cease from all those acts which lead to 



16 

disunion, as evidently as the floAving river does to the 
sea ; it becomes us to desist from wanton vituperation 
of our fellow-citizens of other States, — to desist from 
aggressive assaults on their peace, — to desist from dis- 
obedience to the organic law, — in a word, faithfully to 
observe and maintain both the letter and the spirit of 
the Constitution. 

The living men, who uttered the Declaration of In- 
dependence, have all passed away from time to eternity. 
But their spirits watch over us from the bright spheres 
to which they have ascended. We stand in their pre- 
sence. They shall be our witnesses, as we solemnly 
renew on this day our vows of unalterable attachment 
to the Union, and declare that 

-nor steel, nor poison, 



" Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing" 

shall prevail against it; and to this "we pledge our 
lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor," so help us 
God! 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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